Thursday, October 08, 2009

[IF Competition] The Duel in the Snow - Appendix

I used ZTools to reverse engineer the story file of The Duel in the Snow, because I wanted to know whether I had missed anything important to the story. Findings below, after some spoiler space.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him.

Okay, back to the game. I couldn't find any answers to the question I and others had about the story, so it seems things are not explained.

One slightly suggestive thing that I had not seen in the game:

The book is a slim volume of poetry. Natasha claimed that it was the collected works of one of her friends, an amateur poetess. Sadly, it has seen better days, for now it is all covered in blood and there is a bullet-hole through it.

Unlike in the description when the book is still whole, here we have the verb "claimed", which certainly suggests that Natasha wrote the awful stuff herself.

I was impressed by the number of phrases I had never encountered: this story has been carefully implementen. The number of anecdotes that Kropkin can tell is quite staggering!

I really wonder what command gives you this response:

This game features neither an admiral nor a harpoon gun, but there are plenty of other things to do.

One little gem that I did turn up was the following response:

Surgical techniques in Tsarist Russia aren't that far advanced, I'm afraid! You'll just have to stick with being a man.